Page 685 - les-miserables

They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner.
They had a doll, which they turned over and over on their
knees with all sorts of joyous chatter. From time to time Co-
sette raised her eyes from her knitting, and watched their
play with a melancholy air.
Eponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was
the same as a dog to them. These three little girls did not yet
reckon up four and twenty years between them, but they al-
ready represented the whole society of man; envy on the one
side, disdain on the other.
The doll of the Thenardier sisters was very much faded,
very old, and much broken; but it seemed none the less ad-
mirable to Cosette, who had never had a doll in her life, a
real doll, to make use of the expression which all children
will understand.
All at once, the Thenardier, who had been going back
and forth in the room, perceived that Cosette’s mind was
distracted, and that, instead of working, she was paying at-
tention to the little ones at their play.
‘Ah! I’ve caught you at it!’ she cried. ‘So that’s the way
you work! I’ll make you work to the tune of the whip; that
I will.’
The stranger turned to the Thenardier, without quitting
his chair.
‘Bah, Madame,’ he said, with an almost timid air, ‘let her
play!’
Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice
of mutton and had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with
his supper, and who had not the air of being frightfully poor,

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